How much time do tech buses spend blocking Muni stops? Study hopes to find out

A UC Berkeley study hopes to analyze the time spent when tech employee shuttles stop at Muni stops to pick up or drop off passengers. (Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle)

Tech bus riders: you’re being watched.

Two UC Berkeley masters students want the public to capture video of tech shuttles to find out how long private buses spend blocking Muni stops in San Francisco.

The study, which asks people to submit videos of buses arriving, stopping, and departing from Muni stops, began just after the city’s Jan. 21 decision to let companies that shuttle employees, like Google, Facebook, Apple and LinkedIn, pay a fee to use the stops — the famed $1 per stop, per day.

“We would like to find out what it really costs to provide this service, and no data exists to set a precedent for a fair market price for the use of these stops,” wrote the two graduate students, Dan Howard and Mark Dreger.

Using the crowd-sourced videos, Howard and Dreger hope to paint a full picture of how the buses use public infrastructure. The study’s Facebook page has 17 videos so far, most showing a “dwell time” of between 1 and 2 minutes.

It’s unclear whether they’ll be able to collect enough videos from a wide variety of stops — the main one so far seems to be 24th and Valencia streets — for the data to be useful. Another UC Berkeley shuttle study had some interesting findings about shuttle bus riders, but only had a sample size of 130, which makes it less than ideal considering thousands of people ride the buses every day.

So don’t be surprised if people hold up their phones while the buses are coming and going — but maybe they could be encouraged to capture their reconnaissance in landscape.